Whether it’s a slender arm reaching for a vodka shot in a college dorm room or a working mother cooking dinner with a glass of wine — or three, the amount of alcohol downed by females is raising health concerns as never before.

Journalist and author Ann Dowsett Johnston helped launch the conversation with her 2013 book Drink: The Intimate Relationship Between Women and Alcohol. She’s in Vancouver Tuesday to address a sold-out conference on workplace issues sponsored by the Canadian Mental Health Association. On Thursday, Johnston will be part of a live online forum in conjunction with the premiere of a new documentary on campus binge drinking, Girls Night Out .

Johnston, who helped create Maclean’s magazine’s university ranking system and later served as a senior administrator at McGill University, took on the topic of women and alcohol after deciding it had become her enemy rather than a reliable, trusted friend. After eight years sober, she calls herself the new face of alcoholism: a well-educated, high-performing woman in a demanding job who had fully bought in to the glitter of booze, but not its darker side.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Q. You make the case in your book that, drink-for-drink, women suffer the ill effects of alcohol more quickly than men. Is that message gaining ground?

A. We’re democratically equal, but hormonally and metabolically we’re not. It’s not just body size. And no, I don’t think we’ve appreciated that this is the case.

We didn’t know that 15 per cent of breast cancers were attributable to alcohol consumption. As recently as a year ago, it was estimated that only five per cent of Canadian women knew that.

And it’s not a popular message. It’s the one legal drug we use to relax and reward and unwind.

Q. Those low-risk drinking guidelines say four or more drinks is a binge. Most of my friends call that a dinner party.

A. Most of my friends call that a dinner party, too, but we know that the average binge for women is six drinks.

That comes from women believing that wine is a food group. If you’re sophisticated you know your wines. If you’re an adult you can hold your liquor. These are the messages we hear.

We know for a fact that in the mid-’90s the spirits and wine industries were struggling compared to beer-makers. So they invented alcopop to get the under-performing gender — women — to drink. And it paid off.

Now we have Skinnygirl Cocktails and wine called Mommy Juice. These are not manly drinks.

We’re told if women can go toe-to-toe with men in the workplace and surpass them in post-secondary education, why shouldn’t they have their own drinking culture?

Q. The documentary Girls Night Out, inspired by your book, focuses on that. What surprises you most about how young women drink today.

A. I call it ‘efficient drinking.’ That means ‘pre-drinking’ or ‘pre-loading’ before they go out because it’s expensive to drink in bars. So there’s more alcohol in their apartments or dorm rooms than there was in my generation. When they go out, women are drinking shots, men are drinking beer. They’re at a disadvantage.

And I would argue that social media has changed the whole picture. This is a really public game. You pass out, your picture is circulated on Instagram or Facebook, you’re exposed and very vulnerable.

Binge drinking is linked to assault, rape and even death.

Q. But isn’t this a health issue for all society, not just women?

A. Sure, but what’s fascinating is that men are starting to slow down; women are not.

I’ve been covering this since 2010 and the past month has been one of the more interesting ones in a long time because the chief medical officer of Canada released a remarkable report, Alcohol Consumption in Canada, and the (U.S.) Center for Disease Control recommended that young women who drink use birth control.

Q. Where does Canada stand in terms of how much money provinces collect from taxes on alcohol and how much money they spend on alcohol related illness?

A. We don’t connect the dots between the cash cow of alcohol sales and expenses from emergency room visits and policing. A few years ago, the Centre for Addictions Research of B.C. did a study and found a majority of regions are losing money on alcohol. We need to connect the dots so that the thinking public can make a decision on their own: Is it costing us too much as a society? I think it is.

The documentary Girls’ Night Out premieres on CBC TV’s Firsthand Thursday, February 25 at 9 p.m. A live online panel including Ann Dowsett Johnston and the film’s creator Phyllis Ellis begins immediately after the one-hour show in eastern time zones, at 6 p.m. in Vancouver on the CBC Docs Facebook page.

The film also launches a wider effort to talk about binge drinking in high schools and universities through www.facebook.com/GirlsNightOutDoc and a#RethinkTheDrink Campaign sponsored by the Telus Fund for health.

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